87 Organizacija, Volume 45 Research papers Number 2, March-April 2012 1 Introduction There is no doubt that micro businesses play an important role in modern economy, especially in times of recession, when we can daily see collapsing of large firms that are not able to cope with changed market conditions. In our first study in 1999 we were focusing on small enterprises. Instead of that we got sample mostly with micro enterprises. We cannot generalize that micro enterprise characteristics are similar to small or medium size enterprises. There are not many researchers dealing with micro enterprises characteristics and that is why we are interested in them. The European Union also recognized micro business importance. On 6 May 2003 the Commission of the European Communities (2003) adopted Recommendation 2003/361/EC regarding the defini- tion of micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (SMS) in Community policies applied within the Community and the European Economic Area. Within the SME category, a micro enterprise is defined as an enterprise which employs fewer than 10 persons and whose annual turnover and/or annual bal- ance sheet total does not exceed EUR 2 million (Neuberger and Räthke, 2009). Slovenia accepted this Recommendation as a Member State of EU. According to the findings reported by Matek and Butalič (2009) in Slovenia there were 105.272 enterprises registered in the Standard Classification of Activities (NACE - EU clas- sification of activities) in 2007; 92.8% of them were micro enterprises, 5.7% were small enterprises and 1.5% were medi- um-sized and large enterprises. The overall share of individual private entrepreneurs was 58.1% and of limited liability com- panies 35.9%. Enterprises organized in other organizational forms represented only 6.0% of all enterprises. Despite the large difference in the number of enterprises between micro (1-9 total employees), small (10-49 total employees) and medium-sized enterprises (50-249), each of these three size classes generated around one fifth of total turnover. Among them, most persons were employed in micro enterprises (27.4%), followed by medium-sized (20.8%) and small enter- prises (18.0%) (Matek and Butalič, 2007). Based on the results from the investigation in 1999 (Zupančič and Werber, 2002), recent Slovenian statistical data and present legislation, we decided in 2009 to focus our atten- tion on micro enterprises. 2 Background Micro enterprises cannot be treated as downscaled versions of large companies (Rohde, 2004), due to differences in organi- zation, management style, business practice and information The paper presents the comparison of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) usage in Slovenian micro enterpris- es, using data derived from two studies carried out in years 1999 and 2009. Data for the studies were collected via structured interviews with owners or top managers of micro enterprises. We compared hardware and software equipment, business properties, characteristics of the interviewees and their impact on the successful use of ICT. The results show considerable changes in the ICT equipment, but that does not reflect in a better use of software compared to a decade ago. Key factors of successful use of ICT remain the same. The investment in ICT depends on owners’ decisions and the most important factors are the owners’ formal education and their skills and knowledge in ICT field. It was indicated that in recent years the invest- ment of education in ICT field for both groups, owners and employees, was considerable lowered. Keywords: Micro enterprises, Information and Communication Technology, Research University of Maribor, Faculty of Organizational Sciences, Kidričeva c. 55a, 4000 Kranj, Slovenia anja.znidarsic@fov.uni-mb.si; borut.werber@fov.uni-mb.si Anja Žnidaršič, Borut Werber Usage of Information and Communication Technology in Micro Enterprises in the Last Decade DOI: 10.2478/v10051-012-0009-1 Received: 28 th December 2011; revised 24 th February 2012; accepted 2 nd March 2012